Dirty Work: On Irene Silt’s “My Pleasure” and “The Tricking Hour”
Irene Silt | My Pleasure and The Tricking Hour | Deluge Books | 2022 | 82 Pages, 82 Pages
It’s the first cold night of November. In the backroom of New York’s first self-declared meadery, the opening poet, Nora Treatbaby, reads while standing on top of a table in front of the crowd.
Treatbaby is introducing the author for the launch of two new books: My Pleasure, a poetry collection, and The Tricking Hour, a partner essay collection. Treatbaby slips up and accidentally states the writer’s government name. She giggles and apologizes immediately, then reintroduces them correctly. In a long tradition of anarchist-leaning, criminalized, or otherwise security-conscious artists, the author writes under an alias—Irene Silt.
Silt’s two new books consist of work they wrote for an anonymous column in ANTIGRAVITY. An early essay within it, called “SCREEN TIME,” offers the reader cybersecurity advice, including compartmentalizing one’s online activity via various anonymous online identities.
Respecting their pen name, I tried to do my research on Silt. I found very little. Instead, a Google search returned an unrelated Dear Abby-like column on gardening entitled, “What To Do with Irene’s Silt?” After Hurricane Irene’s flood deposited sediment, an anonymous writer and homeowner called “MJ” wrote into the column to ask what to do about the soil quality in their garden. I began to read a reply from master gardener “Bea,” written in the tone of Irene Silt: tactile, informative, and earnest:
How you deal with your landscape after flood damage really depends on the depth of the silt. First and foremost make sure that the soil is dry before working with it. The soil should form a ball in your hand and then crumble when squeezed with no sign of water.
Despite the insinuation of their pen name, Silt is, as far as I know, not a gardener. They are an abolitionist podcaster, a sex worker, and a writer fascinated by the overlap of disgust and pleasure.
In interviews with The Rumpus and The Unseen Book Club podcast, Silt expressed that before their essay project The Tricking Hour was published—which they wrote between 2018 and 2020—they often traveled to superfund sites, severely contaminated or hazardous zones tracked by the EPA, and other decaying geographies for inspiration. Silt takes “dirty work” and makes it material, vomiting out love or meditating on wastelands. Like soil held in the hand for aeration, Silt finds a way to write about environmental remediation without sanitizing it. Their work relishes in filth, whether in a moment of reflection while meeting a client—“[I] saw myself in the dirt under my fingernails”—or in considering the newest censorship of sex work through FOSTA-SESTA (laws passed during the Trump administration which determined that websites can be liable for content perceived to be promoting prostitution). Writing on these criminalization measures, Silt explains how the stigma against sex workers “relegates us to the margins to keep our dirtiness away from clean families and neighborhoods.”
At large, Silt’s work examines deterioration and creation. “Pleasure might rot if it is not rinsed off,” they write in the poetry book’s titular poem “my pleasure.” “We let it fester and fill up so that we can extract substance from it.” Here and elsewhere, they focus in on the material elements of extraction and production, whether in the form of surplus value created by the ruling class or a moan teased out of a lover. Irene Silt’s writing, despite its focus on alienation, detachment, and dissociation, comes out clearly on the side of connectedness. Through the interplay of their poetry and essays they highlight the impossibilities of disentangling traumas of the past from traumas of the present, the body from its parts, ourselves from others, and the affective from the effective.
Silt is interested in love, sex, politics, work, and the limits of liberation through those means. Their essays veer from memoir toward theory, a work of self-described propaganda and a political project that Silt has undoubtedly been working on for years. They respond to a period in 2018 when police ramped up crackdowns on clubs in Bourbon Street to address ‘human trafficking.’ Strippers and sex workers organized in resistance to the sanitation and gentrification of New Orleans. Self-described socialists were being elected to office but FOSTA-SESTA had just been passed in Congress to clean up the internet. Elsewhere, in at least 17 states, American prisoners went on strike against their cruel living and working conditions. Silt’s writing reflects sharply on these uprisings and their distinct moments in time. It left me wanting more of what they were thinking about and feeling now, post-2020.
Deluge Press describes the essays as “part anti-work polemic, part sex worker’s confession,” and the writing almost always seems to have an aerial point-of-view. Silt has a clear desire for boundlessness and time-bending, writing histories of struggle alongside imagined futures of collective care. There is no isolated subject. The essays serve as a sprawling manifesto, showcasing the peculiarities of pleasure under capitalism and in support of “the movement for sex workers against work.”
These essays shine when Silt is able to change up their pacing and habits, allowing themselves to get more confessional and personal. In “On Love,” Silt wields a second person address: “Are you tired?... Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly,” quoting from a line from Matthew 11:28-30 used by Church ladies on Bourbon Street. The role of the stripper or sex worker is to provide that company, that rest or peace or love. From here Silt contemplates scarcity and individualism in relationships à la Dean Spade’s 2006 essay “For Lovers and Fighters.” Both thinkers rebuke the concept of ‘the couple’ and moreover the elements of control and moralization that characterize a traditional relationship, while at the same time believing in the transformational power of love. In that tension, Silt brings the reader close to their desire for love and care outside transactional labor.
Then they beckon us into the blue light of the club. Returning to the second person, Silt describes finding love at a strip club rather than giving it to a client.
Well, a stripper can grasp you from the inside. She has done it to me. She asked me, can I kiss you on the mouth? Will you let me take your body in sin, will you come with me?
Though hesitant to write about how they experience love at the club, through doing so Silt harnesses the power and romance of private moments in public space. The essay, “Flow State,” is able to ride this energy by describing the intimacy and embodiment of jiu-jitsu, climaxing in joyous concentration through motion and power exchanges with an opponent. In interviews, Silt has said they’ve been surprised to hear their writing described as erotic: “oftentimes I’m writing about sparring,” they explain on The Unseen Book Club podcast.
The final essay of The Tricking Hour, “Feelings,” written in 2020, reads as a thesis on the project as a whole, diving into workaholism, hate fucks, and exhaustion. The reader can see how Silt has grown as a person and a writer over the course of the text. In a book that centers dirt and sex, it makes sense to end with a contemplative shower.
The poems, however, occur in exacting moments of ecstasy and embodiment. Where their essays are sweeping, Silt’s poetry stays corporal, inward, intimate, and will be especially enjoyable for anyone who remains quite online while grappling with the fact that being there is rotting their brain. Silt masters the Twitter-stanza with curt, barbed lines: “I am sorry I missed your DJ set tonight. Imagine a parallel world where I show up.”
Many of these poems take place in a bed: sometimes their own, more often others, real or imagined. Dirty underwear, dirty sheets, an open window. Moments of deep intimacy are punctured by sparse, darkly comic lines as in the title poem, “my pleasure”:
I started to say my pleasure in response to
thank you
washing everyone’s dishes
my pleasure
massaging the shoulder of a friend
my pleasure
driving us for hours through the night
filling up your glass stealing you that shit
developing your thoughts choking the dude out
my pleasure
everything made into pleasure
Silt posits the question often served to them: What is sex without capital? Whether directly in an essay like “NOT YOUR CONSTITUENT” or more abstractly in their poems, their writing harbors skepticism of politicians’ promises to decriminalize sex work: “If abolition to one DSA candidate means reform, what does decriminalization mean to another?” A catch slogan like “sex work is work” may not suffice for liberation—(Of course sex work is work, work sucks.) I was especially enamored with Silt’s simple use of the word workaholic to describe the sick pleasure of ‘grinding’ under capitalism, occasionally referring both to themselves and their clients with the term.
Blame it on the revolving door of my bed
or how the neglect made me masochistic
in a solitary way: a workaholic.
There’s an idea
of feminism as living with consequence,
lacerated bodies communicating their lacerated lives
When Silt is allowed to sprawl and command the reader (often making use of the imperative), like in the poem “the noise commonly referred to as silence,” their writing is at its best. Instead of scarcity, they can luxuriate in intimate moments without interjections.
•
Back at the book’s release party, across from the old steel plant, the poet Rosie Stockton reads before Silt. They share an anecdote in which they witnessed Silt turn to a man at the club to declare “you have no idea what we are capable of.” Amid state oppression, surveillance, and criminalization, amid strained attachments, identities, and relations to our own minds, sex is embodiment and “a zone of potentiality.” As Irene Silt points out, sex is a force of creation and destruction. Their writing begs the question: “what will we do with the force we have cultivated?”